Paul P. Ragonese, Coast Guard mechanical engineer who built race cars, dies

Frederick N. Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun
·4 min read

Paul P. Ragonese, a retired Coast Guard mechanical engineer and automobile enthusiast, died Thursday of Parkinson’s disease at Blakehurst, a retirement community in Towson. He was 87.

“Paul was a good engineer and very methodical,” said Edward A. Katzmarek, a retired engineer and his former supervisor at the Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay in Anne Arundel County.

“He’d check things seven different ways before he turned in a project and he always brought them in on time, but he took his time because he wanted to get it right,” Mr. Katzmarek said. “We built and repaired ships, and he was very good at his work.”

“Ever-ready to modify design or materials, Mr. Ragonese was quick to pull out a tape measure or calculator depending on the need at hand,” wrote a niece, Margaret McAdam Ondov, of Lewes, Delaware, in a biographical profile.

Paul Phillip Ragonese, son of Frank P. Ragonese, an Italian immigrant and tunneling contractor, and Margaret Frischer Ragonese, a homemaker, was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

The family moved to Baltimore and settled on East Belvedere Avenue.

After graduating in 1953 from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Mr. Ragonese attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge for a year before leaving school.

From 1953 to 1955, he worked for his father’s company, Square Construction, as a highway surveyor.

“He barely passed his first year at MIT,” Ms. Ondov said in a telephone interview.

After withdrawing from school, he worked from 1957 to 1960 for Bendix-Friez, an instrument plant, in Towson as a lab tech.

In 1960, he returned to surveying for his father’s company for four years. He went back to college at the Johns Hopkins University and graduated in 1967 with honors from the Whiting School of Engineering. In 1969, he earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

While at Hopkins, he was a member of Tau Beta Pi, an engineering honor society, and joined Mensa.

Projects he was associated with while working for Square Construction included the Mays Chapel reservoir in Baltimore County and the Metro in Washington.

He later worked for the Coast Guard until he retired in 1999. The former longtime resident of the Fox Chapel neighborhood in Timonium served in the Maryland Air National Guard from 1958 to 1964.

“He was a lifelong enthusiast of objects in motion,” his niece wrote. He built a go-cart and a stock car.

“He loved his cars and he even built a hot rod on a Model-A chassis,” Mr. Katzmarek said. “He also loved driving, so whenever we had to go out on a job, I let him drive.”

He was a member of the Moles, an organization of tunneling executives.

“Uncle Paul was an extremely intelligent and well-read man who had read the [St. John’s College Great Books Reading List],” his niece said. “He could quote from memory Alexander Pope or Charles Bukowski, the poet novelist.”

Ms. Ondov described her uncle as a “Renaissance man.”

“He was so intelligent and always wanted to learn, and was extremely engaged intellectually and socially,” she said.

He met his future wife, Anne Henderson, at a dance and the couple married in 1967.

“He loved ballroom dancing,” his niece said.

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Mr. Ragonese’s and his wife’s philanthropic interests included the Johns Hopkins Legacy Society, the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, where in the 1980s he began treatment for glaucoma.

“The Ragoneses have endowed professorships and research funds, expanded resources, clinical care and provided opportunities to educate the next generation of leaders in ophthalmic medicine,” Wilmer director Dr. Peter J. McDonnell told Planning Matters, a Johns Hopkins University and Medicine publication.

“We felt we could do something that would be a benefit to people,” Mr. Ragonese said in the article.

A memorial celebration will be held at 11 a.m. April 6 at the Ruck Towson Funeral Home at 1050 York Road.

In addition to his wife of 57 years, a retired MedStar Union Memorial Hospital registered nurse, and niece, Mr. Ragonese is survived by a nephew, Michael P. McAdam, of Ruxton; another niece, Karoline McAdam Obora, of Naperville, Illinois; and several grand-nieces and grand-nephews.